The Author Of ‘Cat Person’ Has Written About The Horrifying Aftermath Of Her Viral Story
She also has a book coming out.
It’s been just over a year since the New Yorker published that short story called ‘Cat Person’, which pretty quickly went viral and set the internet on fire. Now, the story’s author has written about the experience of having a story blow up on the internet like that, and it sounds absolutely horrifying.
In case you need a reminder, ‘Cat Person’ was a story about a young woman on a blandly bad date with an older man. In great detail, it followed them through some awkward flirting, a bland and unsatisfying date, some bad sex, and an awkward parting of ways.
The story really, really resonated with young women around the world, who found it pretty relatable (the story was released as the #MeToo movement was just beginning to take off). Once ‘Cat Person’ started to get popular, lots of people also started to pick the story to pieces, criticising it as offensive or boring or simply not worth the hype.
And as author Kristen Roupenian wrote today, it turns out having thousands of people weighing in on your work like that is really fucking intense.
“I want people to read my stories—of course I do,” Roupenian wrote. “That’s why I write them. But knowing, in that immediate and unmediated way, what people thought about my writing felt . . . the word I keep reaching for, even though it seems melodramatic, is annihilating.”
“To be faced with all those people thinking and talking about me was like standing alone, at the center of a stadium, while thousands of people screamed at me at the top of their lungs. Not for me, at me. I guess some people might find this exhilarating. I did not.”
Excited for more “Cat Person” discourse
— Rowley Amato (@rowleyamato) January 9, 2019
That’s an experience that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s ever had a post go viral. Roupenian also wrote that a lot of the response to the story seemed uncomfortably focused on her. Media got in touch asking her to talk about sexual harassment as if the (fictional) story was autobiographical; people emailed her detailed accounts of their own bad dates and sexual encounters “because they thought [she’d] ‘just like to know.'”
She also wrote of the crushing feeling of knowing that, at least for a moment, everyone on the internet was picking apart the small details of her work and life.
“For people with low-level social anxiety, a common piece of conventional wisdom is that you should stop worrying so much about what other people think, because no one is actually thinking about you. In fact, this isn’t true, even if you haven’t had a story go viral,” Roupenian wrote.
“Almost everyone we encounter thinks about us. Bad hair, they think, as they pass us on the street. Annoying voice. Nice legs. Gummy smile. Stained shirt. She looks like my third-grade teacher. Why is she taking so long to order her coffee? I hate her stupid face. The problem is not that other people think about us but that their thoughts are so flattening, so reductive in comparison to our own complicated view of ourselves.”
It’s well worth reading her full account of what it was like when ‘Cat Person’ went viral. And if you’re one of the people who spent late 2017 nitpicking about whether ‘Cat Person’ was actually a good story or just a fluke, you might be interested to know that Roupenian has a book of short stories coming out this month. No word yet on whether those stories will also go horrifyingly viral.